Artificial Light

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Stunningly written in prose that is poetic, gripping, and highly adventurous, Artificial Light may be the first American novel to successfully treat the alternative rock scene of the 1990s as a subject for serious literature.

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In 1994, a young woman named Fiat Lux donates twenty-one notebooks full of her writings to a university library and then disappears. It's only later that her close relationship with a well known rock musician who had recently committed suicide is discovered, and the notebook's contents become the subject of growing fascination, conjecture, and gossip. Intending to satisfy the public's insatiable curiosity about the rock star and throw light on the author's rumored involvement in his now infamous death, and, more importantly, hoping to make a case for her remarkable writings as a work of literature, the university's press has decided to publish her notebooks in a single volume under the title she had given them, Artificial Light.
Set in the mythological land of Dayton, Ohio, Artificial Light is part historical novel, part science fiction, part sociological study, part murder mystery. Stunningly written in prose that is poetic, gripping, and highly adventurous, Artificial Light may be the first American novel to successfully treat the alternative rock scene of the 1990s as a subject for serious literature. James Greer has written a novel at once completely original in its form, composition, and outlook and yet as classically pleasurable and informative as any work of contemporary fiction in memory.
Edited by Dennis Cooper.
'Artificial Light beats the bejeezus out of the last dozen Thomas Pynchons, the last nineteen Don DeLillos, and the last forty-three Kurt Vonneguts.' -Richard Meltzer